YOU CAN'T MISS: The New Yorker's Signature Reimagined and GNOMES!

This week on the Media Bistro Unbeige blog, there's a post about the 12 finalists for the re-imagination of The New Yorker's mascot Eustace Tilley. Apparently they received over 600 entries for the contest. The winner gets their design on a tote bag. Woah. If that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what would. Anyway, I came away relatively unimpressed with some of the designs, but maybe that's because I don't understand the New Yorker demographic. Regardless, here a some of my favorites:

While I have no idea if this looks anywhere close to Manhattan, I thought the idea was brilliant and well executed. I didn't get that it was the mascot at first, but I caught on quickly. I'm assuming their readers are at least 10 times smarter than I am, so I'm judging myself on a curve.

This one reminded me of some kind of Japanese-type art, but I was still pulled to it. Something about the bottom image of the old man looking out his window at the butterfly was just incredibly beautiful.

I really like this one because of the modern appeal to it. However, it also looks like a cross between a street sign and an iPod commercial. It just lacks some originality.You can check the rest of the finalists out here.







Finally, its been a rough week for a lot of us I'm sure with the Meredith presentations and what not. I know I'm ready to sleep for the next 24 hours straight. In light of that I bring you: GNOMES!! First of all, if you haven't seen Gnomeo and Juliet yet, you should. It's pretty great. What's also great is this website they put together for the movie in which you can MAKE YOU OWN GNOME! How flippin' cool is that? Besides that fact, the website design is pretty stellar. I didn't even mind waiting for the pages to load, because there was a progress bar of GNOMES!

One of the first cover designs I ever did for MOVE Magazine, way back in freshman year, was for the Mischievous Gnome Collective. I have no idea if it had anything to do with gnomes or not, but my heart was already set on creating a gnome cover. My photoshop skills were pretty horrible at the time and I had never used illustrator. So I proceeded to draw over a photo of a gnome I took, in Photoshop, filling in each area with different colors. It took for-ev-er.

 MOVE Magazine was also really into gnomes (which I had no objections to) so the guitar gnome made a reappearance a year later on the Kanye cover above(if you can spot him). 

Finally, here's the gnome I made special for all of you... If you have an idea for his name, let me know.